The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Read online

•Only women may sell clothing to women.6

  •Men may not wear low-hanging jeans (they’ve got a point there—ed.).7

  •Taxi drivers who overcharge are guilty of theft; they could have a hand amputated, or worse.8

  •Thieves will have their hands amputated (as per Qur’an 5:38). Blackmailers will face killing or crucifixion (as per Qur’an 5:33).9

  •Drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are forbidden.10

  •No political parties or armed groups are allowed other than the Islamic State.11

  •Those who leave Islam are to be killed.12

  •Sharia is the sole law of the land.13

  •Graves and shrines are forbidden, and are to be destroyed.14

  •Those wearing soccer jerseys will receive eighty lashes.15

  There are other rules as well. In December 2014 ISIS was reported to have used “the ‘biter,’” “a bear trap-like device” with spikes, on the breast of a woman who was guilty of “breastfeeding in public” in Raqqa.16 In April 2015 near Tikrit, Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, in April 2015, the Islamic State beheaded a man for “witchcraft.”17 (ISIS authorities did not explain what exactly that meant.) The next month a UN official announced that a young woman in the Islamic State had been burned alive for “refusing to take part in [an] ‘extreme sex act.’”18 A deserter from the Islamic State has recounted that Islamic State prisons in Raqqa are filled with people who were not sufficiently reverent during prayers or who have uttered the name of Allah in a way that Islamic State authorities deemed blasphemous. Their Islamic State captors torture them with sticks and cattle prods, and occasionally even burn prisoners to death.19

  Special Rules for Christians

  Most of the Christians in the Islamic State’s domains fled or were killed; “all who are left there now are a few handicapped or sickly Christians,” remarked a nun from Mosul in June 2014, and the situation has only deteriorated since then.20

  Nonetheless, those who remain have to submit to the rule of Sharia. The Islamic State’s rules mandating the subjugation of Christians are straight out of traditional Islamic law.

  In Sharia, Christians are allowed to live in an Islamic state as “dhimmis” (protected people) only if they submit to a regime of severe restrictions designed to mark their subordinate place in society and defuse any challenge that Christianity might pose to Islam. If Christians disobey these rules, they are no longer “protected,” and the relationship between them and the Islamic authorities reverts to a state of violent hostility.

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  “Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.”

  —Qur’an quotation (9:29) from the preamble to a list of seven rules for Christians issued by the Islamic State in December 201421

  Thus in the Islamic State Christians are forbidden to:

  •Make any public display of their religion (all Christian worship has to take place behind closed doors);22

  •Ring church bells;23

  •Display the cross in public, including in markets and other areas where Christians might come into contact with Muslims;24

  •Pray so loudly that Muslims could chance to hear their prayers;25

  •Build new churches or repair old ones;26

  •Make fun of Muslims or Islam;27

  •Try to prevent anyone from converting from Christianity to Islam.28

  The rules also specify that Christians were not to bear arms and that treachery against the Islamic State is punishable by death.29

  None of these rules is optional. The Islamic State has explained that if Christians reject them, “they are subject to being legitimate targets, and nothing will remain between them and ISIS other than the sword.”30 Of course, one would be hard pressed to find infractions that do not bring the Islamic State’s righteous sword upon the hapless offender.

  EVERYBODY’S DOING IT

  This regime for oppressing Christians was no harsh throwback to the seventh century or misunderstanding and misapplication of Islamic law. These rules are principles of Islamic law accepted to this day by millions of Muslims who live outside the Islamic State. A manual of Islamic law endorsed by Al-Azhar University in Cairo as a reliable guide to the “practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” stipulates that dhimmi Jews and Christians under the “protection” of any Islamic state—are “forbidden to openly display wine or pork . . . to ring church bells or display crosses . . . recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays.”31

  The Islamic State issued new threats to Christians in an April 2015 video, shortly after releasing the footage depicting its beheading of twenty-eight Ethiopian Christians. Islamic State spokesman Sheik Abu Malik Anas An-Nashwan declared,

  We say to Christians everywhere, the Islamic State will expand, with Allah’s permission. And it will reach you even if you are in fortified strongholds. So whoever enters Islam will have security, and whoever accepts the Dhimmah contract will have security. But whoever refuses will see nothing from us but the edge of a spear. The men will be killed and the children will be enslaved, and their wealth will be taken as booty. This is the judgment of Allah and His Messenger.

  The Dhimmah is the contract of protection in Islamic law, whereby Christians and other non-Muslims accept second-class status and institutionalized discrimination in return for the right to continue to live as non-Muslims within the Islamic state.

  ISIS spokesman An-Nashwan laments the fact that Muslims today are not collecting the jizya, the tax specified for non-Muslims in Qur’an 9:29: “In the recent past, these rites were absent from the condition of the Muslim Nation. Rather, these rites were the hostages of jurisprudence books and theoretical legal discussions.”

  The Islamic State spokesman followed that by quoting the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyya: “Whoever does not consider the Jews and Christians to be disbelievers and does not hate them is not a Muslim.” Then he quoted a saying attributed to Muhammad himself: “If you meet Jews or Christians, do not greet them in peace.”

  The video even shows a Christian accepting his subjugated status: “By Allah, we are happy. We’ve seen security under the Islamic State.”32

  Security in exchange for submission.

  Daily Life in the Caliphate: The Islamic State of Fear

  Patrick Cockburn wrote in the Independent in March 2015:

  It is one of the strangest states ever created. The Islamic State wants to force all humanity to believe in its vision of a religious and social utopia existing in the first days of Islam. Women are to be treated as chattels, forbidden to leave the house unless they are accompanied by a male relative. People deemed to be pagans, like the Yazidis, can be bought and sold as slaves. Punishments such as beheadings, amputations and flogging become the norm. All those not pledging allegiance to the caliphate declared by its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on 29 June last year are considered enemies.33

  Strange to those of us accustomed to the recognition of universal human rights and the humanitarian penal code of the Judeo-Christian West, perhaps. But none of this was any departure from Islamic law as it had been codified for centuries. In fact, many of the punishments that drew the attention of a horrified world when ISIS carried them out had been applied by other Sharia-compliant governments for decades.

  In the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, a city of three hundred thousand people, twenty-four-hour Sharia patrols, one for men and one for women, make sure that everyone who ventures onto the street at any time is conforming to the strictures of Islamic law.

  They are little different from the religious police that terrify the citizenry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but this new Sharia regime represents a significant change from the relatively secul
ar rule of Bashar Assad. Abu Saif, an observer on the scene in Raqqa, noted, “People have started growing their beards, people have started praying on time, and during prayer times all the shops close. All this might come across as small details for some people, but this is a whole lifestyle change for civilians.”34

  EXECUTIONERS WANTED

  In May of 2015, the New York Times reported, “Job seekers in Saudi Arabia who have a strong constitution and endorse strict Islamic Law might consider new opportunities carrying out public beheadings and amputating the hands of convicted thieves.” The Kingdom was advertising eight executioner positions because of an uptick in beheadings and “a scarcity of qualified swordsmen in some parts of the country.” The Times did report that the amputations of thieves’ hands are “rarely carried out”—not because that punishment isn’t clearly established in Sharia and thus in the laws of Saudi Arabia, but because “judges consider it distasteful.”35 The judges in the Islamic State aren’t so squeamish.

  The Islamic State also deploys a uniformed military police, primarily to track down jihadis who have fled from the front lines and send them back to the battle.36

  Schools remain open, but the curriculum has been significantly altered to reflect the Islamic State’s priorities. According to Abu Saif, “Schools and universities are a big disaster, they have changed the curriculum a lot. They forbade law studies, philosophy, and other social studies, which they consider infidel studies and ‘outside the Shariah of Allah.’”37

  Smoking Kills

  The Islamic State authorities take a dim view of smoking because they regard it as a slow-motion form of suicide, which is forbidden in the Qur’an: “And do not kill yourselves” (4:29).

  The way the Islamic State has dealt with smoking epitomizes how it deals with everything it opposes: with threats and increasing brutality. In Mosul in November 2014, the Islamic State decreed that any shop owners found to have sold cigarettes would be fined $580 and given two weeks in jail and eighty lashes. Cigarette importers would get a $3,300 fine, plus four months in jail, and also eighty lashes. Those simply caught smoking would be fined $16.38

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  “Every smoker,” ISIS has declared, “should be aware that with every cigarette he smokes in a state of trance and vanity is disobeying God.”39

  In its de facto capital of Raqqa, the rules were even more draconian. If a shop was found to be selling cigarettes, it was closed down. Islamic State jihadis took pliers to the fingers of one man who was caught smoking on the street. Abu Mohammed Hussam of the anti-ISIS group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) explained that the Islamic State has a series of punishments for serial smokers: “The first time he will be arrested and flogged (40 lashes). If he smokes again, he will be whipped and imprisoned. On the third occasion, he will be taken to a camp in the countryside and fined a large sum of money.”40

  What if someone were caught smoking a fourth time? A deputy emir for the Islamic State’s police force in the Syrian province of Deir al-Zor, who also served as an ISIS executioner, was himself found beheaded in January 2015. There was a cigarette stuck between the lips of his severed head. Written on the body was “This is evil, O Sheikh.”41

  Abu Bakr al-Janabi, an Islamic State supporter who helps spread ISIS propaganda online, praised the Islamic State’s efforts to get people to quit smoking: “It took time for ISIS until they implemented the law, but after having lectures about it and so on, there is no objection—with exception to those who smoke. It’s a little hard for them to suddenly quit smoking. But ISIS have been very good at helping them quit.”42

  Indeed. What could be a more effective deterrent to smoking than the prospect of being beheaded for it? Surgeon General, take note!

  Reign of Terror

  The Islamic State brings bloodshed and brutality wherever it goes. In April 2015, it seized and occupied the Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees, four miles from the center of Damascus. One man who escaped recalled the Islamic State’s casual and even gleeful bloodlust: “I saw severed heads. They killed children in front of their parents. We were terrorized. We had heard of their cruelty from the television, but when we saw it ourselves . . . I can tell you, their reputation is well-deserved.”

  A teenage boy who also got away remembered more horrors: “In Palestine Street, I saw two members of Daesh playing with a severed head as if it was a football.”43

  In October 2014, ISIS executed a seventeen-year-old boy for apostasy and then crucified the dead body, leaving it on display as a warning to others.44 In one frenzied two-day period of January 2015, Islamic State jihadis hurled a gay man off a tower, stoned a woman to death for adultery, and crucified no fewer than seventeen young men.45 The Islamic State drew crowds to such events, holding grisly executions in public even as children watched.46 On other occasions it published photographs of stonings and other Sharia punishments on social media.47

  All this was likely calculated to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (Qur’an 8:60). But the gruesome executions also appear to be serving as entertainment for his friends. It seems that some within the Islamic State’s domains have grown accustomed to the bloodlust and begun to enjoy the spectacle—or perhaps they fear to show anything but enthusiasm for the executions, under the watchful eye of the Sharia police. In February 2015, the Islamic State set up giant screens around Raqqa to show its burning alive of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh; throngs watched and cheered the poor man’s horrific death.48

  The Islamic State has developed an elaborate and sophisticated secret service structure, worthy of a nascent totalitarian state that intends to assert total control over its citizens, and to watch them closely to ensure they toe the line. This spy network enables ISIS not only to enforce Sharia penalties, but to assert total control of an area. When conquering a new town or city, Islamic State operatives have been instructed to:

  •List the powerful families.

  •Name the powerful individuals in these families.

  •Find out their sources of income.

  •Name names and the sizes of (rebel) brigades in the village.

  •Find out the names of their leaders, who controls the brigades, and their political orientation.

  •Find out their illegal activities (according to Sharia law), which could be used to blackmail them if necessary.49

  All this and more is used to assert total control over the new area, and solidify that control quickly and decisively.

  It Really Is a State—It Even Has a Consumer Protection Office

  Even amidst all this coercion, terror, and bloodlust, however, the Islamic State is trying to set up a viable state. “With the departments they have established, they really have created a state. One cannot deny that, for instance, they opened a consumer protection office. If one has a restaurant and they came to check it out, and the meat was bad, or it was exposed to dirt or sunlight, they would take expired material and dispose of it as a sanitary action. They follow up on these issues completely with the departments they have created.” So reported Abu Saif, an opponent of the Islamic State in Raqqa.50

  And it was true: the Islamic State moved quickly to establish genuine governance. It was initially organized with a command structure that indicated its intention to govern in a manner that at least in some ways resembles the manner in which a conventional state is governed. As of October 2014, the Islamic State leadership included the following officials (some of the offices appear to be what we might style “in waiting”—the ISIS governor of Baghdad, for example, like a member of Britain’s “shadow cabinet” standing ready to take power—except that while Labour is hoping to win the next election, ISIS is planning to conquer the Iraqi capital by force of arms):

  •Caliph: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

  •Deputy to the Caliph, Overseer of the Iraqi Provinces: Abu Muslim al-Turkmani51 (killed in December 2014)52

  •Deputy to the Caliph, Overseer of the Syrian Province
s: Abu Ali al-Anbari53

  •War Minister: Abu Suleiman54

  •Senior Military Commander: Abu Wahib55

  •Director of Military Operations in Syria: Umar al-Shisani56

  •Finance Minister: Abu Salah57

  •Minister of General Coordination: Abu Hajar al-Assafi58

  •Minister of General Management: Abu Abd al-Kadir59

  •Minister for Social Services: Abu Saji60

  •Minister of General Security: Abu Louay (a.k.a. Abu Ali)61

  •Governor of Baghdad: Abu Maysara62

  •Governor of Anbar and Chief of the Military Council: Abu Abdul Salem (Abu Mohammed al-Sweidawi)63

  •Governor of the “Border Provinces”: Abu Jurnas64

  •Governor of the South and Central Euphrates: Abu Fatima (Ahmed Mohsen Khalal al-Juhayshi)65

  •Governor of Kirkuk: Abu Fatima (Naima Abd al-Naif al-Jouburi)66

  •Governor of Raqqa: Abu Luqman67

  •Governor of Aleppo: Abu Atheer al-Absi68

  •Governor of Deir ez Zour: Haji Abd al-Nasir69

  •Governor of Homs: Abu Shuayb al-Masri70

  •Governor of Salaheddin: Abu Nabil71

  •Chief Spokesman: Abu Muhammad al-Adnani (Taha Sobhi Falaha)72

  •Chief of Media Operations: Ahmad Abousamra73

  Then there were a few positions that we don’t see in the cabinets of Western leaders—at least not yet:

  •Minister for Foreign Fighters and Suicide Bombers: Abu Kassem74

  •Sharia Official: Abu Hummam al-Athari75

  •Coordinator for the Affairs of Martyrs and Women: Abu Suja76

  •Minister for Explosives: Abu Kifah77

  •Minister for Weapons: Abu Sima78

  •Minister of Prisoners: Abu Mohammed (Bashar Ismail al-Hamdani)79

  ISIScare

  Mujahidah bint Usama (Jihad Warrior the Daughter of Osama) was a doctor in Britain before she traveled to the Islamic State. Once there, she posted on her Twitter feed a photo of herself wearing a niqab, the Islamic veil that covers the face, and a white lab coat and holding a severed head as two children stand by. Her caption: “Dream Job.. A Terrorist Doc,” along with a smiley face and two hearts.80